


A Cup of Good Cheer

by Nerissa



Category: Revenge (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - 1920s, Alternate Universe - Historical, Christmas, Gen, Prohibition, Strong Language
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-12-24
Updated: 2012-12-24
Packaged: 2017-11-22 08:41:01
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,737
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/607931
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Nerissa/pseuds/Nerissa
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Nolan wrangles Emily an invitation to Victoria Grayson's Christmas party. He spends most of the evening having second thoughts . . . and drinks. Lots of drinks.</p>
            </blockquote>





	A Cup of Good Cheer

**Author's Note:**

  * For [intrikate88](https://archiveofourown.org/users/intrikate88/gifts).



Victoria Grayson’s Christmas Party was the highlight of New York’s social season. The very knowing of it was said to make Mona Harrison pea-green with envy, but there were others who said Mona’s jealousy was nothing more than a rumor begun by Victoria herself, and who’s to say, really, which was true?

All Nolan Ross knew for sure was that even with his considerable clout and rising social star (“just the other day Mrs. Whitney stopped me in Central Park and told me I’d made her luncheon a _smash_ ”) he’d had a devil of a time ensuring that he was invited to the Grayson Christmas party.

Which meant Emily had damn well better be grateful, or else . . . well, he’d really not worked out a suitable “else” but there was bound to be something he could do in retaliation. Maybe. With Emily it was difficult to say.

Even now, as he gave the tall, broad doorman of her building an awkward nod and sidled past the unsmiling man into the lobby he guarded, Nolan wasn’t entirely certain how she’d react to his news that he’d gotten them invited. She _should_ be pleased. A rational person would be pleased. But this was Emily.

She answered his ring of the buzzer as though she’d already known it was him.

“Nolan,” she observed. He nodded, grinned, and shuffled his feet. She sighed, and stepped to the side to wave him in.

Nolan often accused Emily of having an apartment that was at odds with her persona. He argued that Emily, who made a point of presenting modesty and manners as her selling points (never mind that she turned up everywhere that anyone of consequence was known to appear) should not have chosen as her home a marvel of modern 1920s engineering with more space than furniture to fill it, and ridiculously expensive rugs in all the places furniture wasn’t.

“The 1040,” he’d scoffed, “is for _new_ people. I thought you were putting yourself out there as having a history.”

“It has to be the 1040,” Emily had said, unperturbed. “It can’t be any other.” Then she had given him that Look, the one that he felt meant she was wondering if one day she would need to kill him, and he’d changed the subject.

Now he was grateful for her English furniture (though everybody who was anybody knew English furniture was on the outré) because it gave him the chance to slink behind a heavy lamp and around a low sofa to keep him out of her direct line of view as he shared his development.

“I’ve got the line on the Grayson Christmas party,” he announced, studying the far wall.

“That’s good news,” Emily decided.

He swallowed, and rocked back on his heels.

“I’m going with you.”

A palpable chill emanated from the part of the room where Emily stood. “Like hell you are.”

On too many women the line would have sounded shrill or vacuous or overdone. On Emily, it sounded like the promise of a cut throat if he dared to argue.

He dared, anyway.

“Ems, I’ve got to. I got us in because of _me_. If you show up without me . . .”

“They wouldn’t turn me away.”

“Wouldn’t they? Conrad Grayson kicked a friend’s son to the curb just last month. Kid was cuddling up to Charlotte, I guess. Broke off a connection of four generations because somebody held his daughter’s hand. That’s temper for you. There’s nothing that family wouldn’t do.”

Emily inclined her head.

“You’re right,” she said. “There’s really not.”

Then she left the room, and Nolan in it. He looked around, then called after her:

“ . . . I’m coming, then?”

 

***

Nolan went. Emily made him remove his faddish white dinner jacket (“good God, man, they’ll think you’re a _waiter_ ”) and gave him a suitable black one from her closet, which prompted Nolan to ask where she’d come by a black dinner jacket.

“It was my father’s,” said Emily. Then she put her back to him, wrapping her black sealskin around her shoulders, adjusting the set of her silver bandeau and giving her flawless reflection a critical once-over in a glass of ridiculous size and ostentatious framing. Nolan was left to tug uncomfortably at the cuffs of a jacket once worn by a man who’d died in prison.

Emily wouldn’t be here if it weren’t for her father. Not only was this true in the strictly biological sense, it was also true in a grander, more philosophical sense. Not that Nolan was ever given over much to grand philosophy—he held the patent on two radios and a telephone, not to mention he’d designed and did brisk business in three of the nation’s most popular types of still, so when it came to the esoterics of philosophy, he really didn’t have the _time_ —but even an arriviste inventor of not-yet-twenty-five could face a slightly philosophical fact or two.

If Conrad Grayson hadn’t thrown David Clarke at the Feds, rather than have it come out that Conrad himself had bolstered his failing financial empire on the profits garnered from bootlegged liquor, Emily would have been content to remain at the family home on Long Island, the jewel in her father’s domestic crown and an enigma to the wider society in which he moved.

But the accidental addition of industrial alcohol to the workings of Grayson’s stills, resulting in the mass poisoning of more than 1,300 people, had drawn too much heat from the government to ignore. So while his chief accountant slept, Conrad had rapidly effected the transfer of several incriminating properties, falsified employment records of persons already convicted and ready to swear to any lies necessary to ensure their families wouldn’t starve while breadwinners served a prison term, and David Clarke awoke to find himself accused of mass manslaughter and reviled around the nation.

Within hours the Clarkes’ Long Island home had been laid siege to by an army of newspapermen, determined to snag a photo and quote from the lady of the house, a girl not yet twenty. But already Miss Clarke was not in residence. She had left that morning for the city, becomingly if modestly dressed in street clothes, hat, and a neat, dark walking coat. She had not been seen again.

Somewhere between the station of her departure and Grand Central itself, Amanda Clarke disappeared, and Emily Thorne was born. She stepped from the train in a cloud of silver foxfur and a black velvet cap that clung, modishly snug, to her skull. Her shoes were the last gasp in style, and her ankles were perfection itself. She had taken a taxicab to the real estate agent of her choosing, where she had presented herself with the intent to purchase a property—any property—offered for sale on a particular street, on a particular block.

Money, she made it clear, was no object.

“Only because it’s _my_ money,” Nolan had pointed out once. But only once. Because Emily had reminded him, with a Look and a question, that Nolan would not have been in a position to make the money if not for her father.

“How much do you think your life is worth?” she’d asked, and Nolan, chastened, had fallen silent. Because it was true: he owed his life to her father.

David Clarke had been a good man, generous and willing to take a chance on an orphan home escapee with nothing going for him but an aptitude for wiring, a string of identity fraud charges and a glimmer of an idea for a new type of radio. Yes, David Clarke had been a very good man.

David Clarke’s daughter, on the other hand, was just plain terrifying.

Nolan often wondered if that was the real reason Emily hadn’t mixed in society, back when she’d been Amanda. Maybe David had seen his kid would definitely do a murder someday, and resolved to limit her access to potential victims as much as he possibly could.

If only David could have known that restricting Amanda’s access to the wider world was the very thing that allowed her to enter it as a new woman altogether, and plot her revenge with impunity. 

 

***

“Stop fiddling with your cuffs,” Emily ordered. The smile on her face reshaped itself around the words, as natural and easy-looking as the cascade of silver snowflakes that appeared to tumble down the banister of the grand staircase in the Grayson front hall. Nolan knew better than anyone that both snowflakes and smile, effortless as they may have appeared, were the construct of tactical genius: all support and strategic wiring, without so much as a cord in sight.

“I can’t help it,” he said, hating the way Emily always made him sound like a petulant child every time she scolded him. “It’s not my coat.”

“It is tonight,” returned Emily, “so _act_ it.”

“Says the woman whose _life_ is an act.”

“So help me Nolan, if you do not behave tonight I will shoot you in the face.”

He didn’t doubt it. He stuffed his hands in his pockets, and forbore to fiddle.

The Grayson home was a Manhattan palace, a glittering testament to the possibilities garnered by ruthlessness and near-bottomless pockets. Emily moved through the equally glittering crowd that filled it, Nolan following like a puppy she’d brought along on a whim. It was hard not to feel that way whenever she had on what he called her “people face.”

Which was to say, the face she reserved for everyone who wasn’t him.

Emily could be charming, when she wanted to be. Her “people face” had a “people voice” to go with it, a soft, demure, silvery tone that accompanied a Kewpie doll smile and the extension of a hand so slim, soft and white that Nolan had more than once seen people cling to it a moment or two more than was absolutely necessary, as if marvelling that any person could have hands as soft as rose petals.

Of course, there were always a few who were immune. Victoria Grayson’s smile as she accepted Emily’s hand could only be described as crystalline: bright, cold, and with a few too many facets to follow them all at once.

“Miss . . . Thorne,” she said, pausing almost imperceptibly over the name. “It seems we have quite often had the pleasure of crossing paths this season.”

“Yes,” Emily’s lips were especially sweetly puckered as she spoke, her tones so honeyed that Nolan had to take a quick swig of his drink to avoid gaping at her, “I’ve been so fortunate in the company of Mr. Ross. He’s been an invaluable sponsor in these matters. He’s seen to it that I have wanted for no form of entertainment.”

“How good of him.” A new edge presented itself in Victoria’s smile when she turned it on Nolan. It was all he could do not to flinch. “And you find the company tonight to your liking?”

“Oh yes,” said Emily, “very much. You have such lovely friends.”

“Mmm, yes,” Victoria agreed. “Though you would be incorrect to assume that I count all here my friends.” Yet another edge presented in her smile. “I’m afraid post-war society is really much like post-war liquor. Not quite the _genuine_ article, but it will serve.”

Then she and Emily touched cheeks, and went their separate ways.

“What the hell was _that_?” Nolan gasped, after rapidly downing the rest of his drink.

“Oh,” said Emily, “couldn’t you follow that? I’m arriviste and gauche but she’s worried she can’t afford to offend me by cutting me outright. She doesn’t know how much of my money there is, and she’s still arriviste enough herself that she doesn’t dare alienate somebody who might outrank her someday. I _told_ you why I needed the 1040, didn’t I? It’s the cachet. She desperately wants to tell me I’m nobody, but she’s terrified I might turn out to be Somebody.”

“No,” said Nolan, “I definitely could not follow that.” And he looked around for another drink.

 

***

Emily had not wanted the invitation to the Grayson party for access to the Graysons; not right away. Rather, she explained to Nolan, she had wanted it because it was the one social event of the year at which she could be reasonably certain that Jacob Klein would appear. The accountant who had worked under her father, the man who had succeeded him in that position when David was sent to prison, was reclusive to the extreme. Only his odd sense of humor drew him forth once per year to attend, of all things, a Christmas party.

Nolan had no idea what the man even looked like, but Emily did. She had gone to her father’s office once, and passed him in the hallway. She was confident he wouldn't remember her—she had been sixteen, bespectacled and respectably dowdy at the time—but she had an eye for faces.

Especially when they meant something to her.

Tonight, Jacob Klein meant the promise of drawing one step closer to her ultimate goal of exposing Conrad Grayson for exactly who he was, the monster that had let over a thousand people die for drinking his rush-job booze, and then pushed the blame on her father, who had died in a prison cell that never should have been his in the first place.

Tonight was an even bigger night for Emily Thorne than it was for Victoria Grayson—and _that_ was saying something.

“Do you see him?” Nolan wondered. He followed close behind Emily as the crowd grew thicker. Emily shook her head, scanning faces.

“No. He’s not—wait. There.” Her entire posture radiated such overwhelming restraint, Nolan pressed close beside her and said,

“Emily. You look like you’re going to snap something. Relax.”

She did, with perceptible effort. She did not take her eyes off the small, neatly-dressed figure against the far wall.

“Is that him?” Nolan wondered. “The little guy talking to Conrad, there?”

“That’s him.” Emily’s breath came in quick, short measures. “I need to get closer. I have to hear what they’re saying.”

“Well, okay. But we should make this look natural. You go cutting across the ballroom like a bloodhound through a tea party, and folks are going to notice.”

“You’re right.” Emily turned, grabbed his hand and wrapped it around her waist. “You know how to waltz, right?”

“I know how to _what_? Wait, Emily—” but she had already stepped off, pulling him with her, waltzing through the crowd with such aggressive purpose he wondered if they were really any less noticeable than they would have been if she’d just ploughed through the dancers after all.

Probably not. The band was playing _Liza_ and everybody around them was dancing the Charleston.

 

***

Amazingly enough, they reached the far wall without anybody looking at them too closely. Nolan supposed that was what enough good booze and great music could do for you. Bearing that in mind, he grabbed another cocktail off a tray. Emily did too, but didn’t drink. She put the glass to her lips in a mechanical fashion, and fixed her eyes over the rim on the pair locked in conversation behind the nearest pillar.

“ . . . don’t like it,” Klein was saying earnestly. “Really, Mr. Grayson, I’d be much more comfortable—”

“Shall we continue this in my study?” Grayson urged. “A little more private there, don’t you think?”

Emily shot Nolan a quick, triumphant look, then slipped around the pillar on the wall side just in time to watch the pair disappear through a nearby door.

“Nolan, now!” she urged. “Come on, it has to be now!”

So Nolan followed close behind, down a narrow corridor and out the door at the end of it into the frigid air of the back garden.

“Christ, it’s cold!” he yelped.

“Don’t be such a baby. Have you got the—that thing with you, like I asked?”

Nolan had. The small, portable device was about as big as a woman’s cloche hat when it was unfolded, a tiny turntable with a single record ready for recording.

“And it will work?” Emily asked, watching Nolan fit the machine together. He gave her a look ripe with professional indignation.

“It will work!” he said. She nodded.

“Good.”

Her hand on the latch was feather-light. When she lifted the handle, Nolan had the machine already running. They stepped in from the garden to stand just behind the full-length curtains that lined the walls of Conrad Grayson’s study. The door was pulled shut, silently, behind them.

The machine continued to spin.

“—more than I signed on for,” Jacob Klein was explaining. “Clarke and I were never best friends, but he was a decent man. I respected him. I was willing to go along as long as I wasn’t sure, but those figures I mentioned that turned up . . . the whole thing stinks, Mr. Grayson. I don’t want any part of it.”

“I see.” Conrad Grayson seemed to be measuring the weight of each word before he spoke it. “And what is it that you intend to do with this information?”

Despite the care with which he spoke, some degree of menace must have slipped through, perceptible to Klein.

“I’m no rat, Grayson, if that’s what you mean,” he said stiffly. “But then, again . . . I’m no rat. Holding Clarke’s job doesn’t sit well with me. If you could see fit to reassign me to a different responsibility within your company, I would consider that acceptable. Whatever you did to frame Clarke can’t be undone now; the man’s dead. Stirring up a hornet’s nest is no more in my best interest than it is yours.”

“Well put,” Grayson agreed. Some of the tension eased from the room.

“That said,” Klein concluded, “if you’ll agree to, erm, redistribute my services . . .”

“Consider it done,” Grayson said magnanimously.

“Excellent,” Klein sounded more at ease with each exchange. “That’s . . . excellent. Thank you.”

“Not at all,” Grayson’s smile touched his voice. “Now please, Jacob, enjoy the rest of the party.”

“I will, sir,” Klein promised. “That I will.”

The click of the study door signalled his exit, but Grayson himself didn’t leave right away. Emily dared to fit her eye to the break in the curtains just in time to see him cross to a safe, spin the dial—she watched narrowly, noting the approximate position of the dial at each rotation—and open it to examine some papers within.

It was more a cursory look than anything exhaustive, but the sight of the documents seemed to satisfy Grayson. He replaced them in the safe and swung a small painting back in place to conceal its location. Then he crossed the room and was on the point of reaching for the door handle when the door opened of its own accord A beaming girl in a dainty, mint-green party frock ran in. Emily stiffened, and drew back from the curtain.

“There you are, Daddy!” the girl scolded. “Mama sent me to find you. She said not to hide away like this, when it’s our party.”

“Yes, she’s right,” Grayson smiled. He smoothed a fond hand over the girl’s neat rows of pincurls. She yelped, and batted his hand away.

“Daddy! Do you know how _long_ those took to put in?”

“Do I know? Charlotte, I heard you hollering all through the house all morning, didn’t I?”

“Well,” Charlotte pouted, “it hurt.”

“Yet you kept at it.”

“Of course! They look _divine_ , don’t they?” she prompted, and her father smiled.

“They do look very nice,” he agreed. “All right, my dear, far be it from me to defy a royal edict. We’ll go back to the party, and you can show off the divine product of your day’s tortuous labors.”

“You’re mean to tease me,” Charlotte scolded, but she was smiling, and when she and her father returned to the party, they went off arm in arm.

Emily stayed behind the curtain until they were gone. Once the study was empty she crossed to the safe, spun the dial and got it open on the second try. The papers she removed, studied, and folded into a tight square small enough to tuck in her evening clutch. A set of tallies and accounts that appeared to have been torn from a ledger, they would be a perfect complement to their recording, provided only . . .

“Did we get it?” she whispered. Nolan bent to check the device, fiddled a knob, and nodded cautiously.

“Looks like,” he said.

“Good,” said Emily. Her eyes were bright and wet in the darkened room.

 

***

Emily didn’t make her move that night. Nolan couldn’t figure it out. He thought maybe he was having so much trouble wrapping his head around it because his head was swimming with the eight cocktails he’d enjoyed (and part of the ninth he was working on now) but that wasn’t a guarantee.

Sometimes with Emily you could be as sober as a judge (well, no judges Nolan knew, but there had got to be a sober one somewhere out there, right?) and she’d still leave you spinning your wheels, trying to work out what the hell she was up to.

“So why not strike now?” Nolan wondered. He stood beside Emily in the gallery, looking down on the celebratory throng below. “This is what you need, right? The last piece of the puzzle to bring him down. You could do it right here, in front of everybody. Smash ‘em all at their own party. That’s what you’re after, innit? Total, public destruction?”

Emily nodded.

“So . . .” he prompted.

She passed one hand over the polished walnut railing. Nolan followed her gaze down to the dance floor, where Charlotte Grayson was twirling in her father’s arms, her face alight with the glow of the holiday.

“It’s Christmas,” she said at last. “And they’re a family. They’re an awful one in a lot of ways, but they’re still a family. Families should be happy at Christmas.”

Nolan almost choked on his drink.

“God damn, the Ice Queen has a heart! Who knew? Who would have guessed that Emily Thorne—”

“I _will_ shoot you, Nolan.”

“Duly noted,” said Nolan, and took another drink. Then he held it up to clink against hers. “Cheers, Ems. And Merry Christmas.”

Emily’s gaze flicked down to Nolan’s drink, then back to the crowds that milled below.

“Merry Christmas,” she agreed.

And in that moment, it almost was.

**Author's Note:**

> I hope this touches a little on what you were looking for! The prompt made me badly want to do it justice, but time kind of ran away from me. Even so, I really enjoyed working with these two in this era, and I hope there was something here that made you smile.
> 
> Happy Yuletide!


End file.
